Lightsources

A synchrotron light source is a source of electromagnetic radiation produced by a storage ring, for scientific and technical purposes. The major applications of synchrotron light are in condensed matter physics, materials science, biology and medicine. Metrology Light Source(MLS) is a minor light source near BESSY II. It like a small replica of BESSY. Accelerator and us, just like patient and doctors. We need a stethoscope to know the situation of the patient. My work here is to develop a tool to monitor and adjust the chromacity of this storage ring. The chromacity here is not for the synchrotron light, it is a parameter toRead More →

At the end of the 90s, a consortium of several German research institutions proposed a multi-purpose infrared beamline for the new electron storage ring BESSY II under the acronym IRIS (InfraRotInitiative Synchrotronstrahlung). Funded by two proposals to the BMBF the beamline started operating in 2002 as a Cooperative Research Groupe (CRG) beamline and turned into a BESSY-operated beamline in 2004 at the end of the BMBF funding period.Read More →

I work at the EMIL beamline which is a very complex system. It provides light for the EMIL laboratory (Energy Materials In-situ Laboratory Berlin) by combining two undulators: UE48 for the soft X-ray range and cryo-cooled U17 for the hard X-ray range. It delivers an energy range from 80 eV to 10000 eV to five end-stations. It has ten mirror chambers to guide the light and three monochromators to select the required energies, and it has a length of 62 m while only 1 m width.Read More →

Chemist Manfred Weiss manages the MX beamlines at BESSY II in Berlin-Adlershof, Germany. Here, researchers and pharmaceutical companies study the structure of crystalline molecules and discover triggers of disease – mostly in the search for new medicines. He still clearly remembers the call that came in at 4 a.m.: Manfred Weiss was the scientist on standby in case of problems, and on the other end of line were the scientists currently experimenting at one of his beamlines. “We’re finished. Everything went well, thank you,” they informed the sleepy chemist. This was a few years ago and it still makes Weiss smile to think back toRead More →

By Elżbieta Wątor How to get back to BESSY II ? From Kraków where I study, it’s really easy. By car – it’s around 6 hours and the route is quite convienient. There is also a Ryanair flight to Berlin Schönefeld every morning or Flixbus several times per day. But how to organise that? Here’s my brief story: My participation in the 2017 Summer Student Programme was a happy coincidence. In November 2016 I took part in a small student seminar at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, where Rafał Piwowarczyk (a summer student in MX group at BESSY II in 2016) talked about his stayRead More →

Thermoplastic ionomer materials such as Nafion do have many talents: they can be used as membranes for proton exchange in fuel cells, but they have also attracted attention as shape memory materials: Via external stimuli such as heat or an electric field, it is possible to trigger a change in shapes. Applications in textiles, biomedicine, aerospace, sensors and coatings are possible. Nafion: a membrane with shape memory Nafion is one of those materials: as a membrane in a fuel cell, its high proton conductivity allows a fast pass of hydrogen ions (protons). And its internal shape plays a crucial role. Now a team from Brazil hasRead More →

by Jonas Böhm The last finishing touches are being made to the cryogenic undulator CPMU-17 before it will be installed in the BESSY II storage ring next week. A good moment to look back. The long way of undulators: 70 years old and still up-to-date Home of the first undulator was Stanford. Its linear accelerator (you can see its tunnel in the image) is claimed to be “the world’s most straight object”. In 1952, the Austrian scientist Hans Motz and his team conducted the first experiment, in which a 100-Mev electron beam from the Stanford linear accelerator passed through the undulator. Light radiated by the beam wasRead More →

by Katharina Kolatzki With the new cryogenic undulator CPMU-17 being installed into the BESSY II storage ring, I thought it a good moment to get everyone who may not be that familiar with this essential part of the synchrotron up to speed. What is an Undulator? By now, you might have noticed that undulators are pretty cool things (even the room temperature devices) that are an essential part of synchrotron sources such as BESSY II. In order to understand a little bit more about them, here is a brief introduction to undulators. Synchrotron sources provide especially brilliant light that can be used to examine aRead More →

Time is an intriguing concept, isn’t it? We could summarize our own existence in terms of seconds, but there is so much more happening in shorter periods of time, and that’s the main objective of my project. We care about “picoseconds”, an incredibly small subdivision of the second. To help putting things into perspective, there are as many picoseconds in a second as seconds are in THIRTY ONE THOUSAND AND SEVEN HUNDRED years. Yeah, that´s right. But what the hell happens during that time? Well, electrons happen. The guys responsible for driving our whole world as we know it today happen to have an incredibly rich andRead More →